Frustrated With Your Job Search?

You’ve been on the hunt for a new job for months but are not getting the response from potential employers you expected. You know you are qualified for the job, but no one seems interested. You’ve applied to countless opportunities, but you’re receiving no call-backs. These common scenarios can cause you to question yourself, your experience and your accomplishments. Sure, all of those are incredibly important components to landing a job, but the most important, first step that so many job hunters are getting wrong is having an impactful resume. The bottom line that rings true for so many people today is that it’s not you, it’s your resume.

In today’s ultra-competitive job market, having a resume that can effectively tell your story of success while being aesthetically pleasing is of the utmost importance. While there are many components that go into creating a fantastic resume, there are 3 incredibly important, yet simple, things that are often overlooked: format, recruitment technology, and use of specifics.

Format: A cluttered and ill-formatted resume can cause many recruiters to pass onto the next candidate without giving your resume a second look. A properly-formatted resume enables the reader to understand the story of your success in a way that flows and allows them to have interest in reading through the content. Here are some tips to accomplishing a properly-formatted resume:

• Use clean and consistent headings to properly organize your information; the use of too many fonts and/or text sizes can add unnecessary clutter and confusion to what you are attempting to highlight.
•  Break up your information using bullets to avoid large blocks of content; large blocks of content can lose a reader’s interest causing them to skip-over content.
• Be aware of the use of excessive or not-enough white space; a nice balance of white space on a resume can be aesthetically pleasing to the eye and provide flow to your resume.

Recruitment Technology: Many job seekers are unfamiliar with the term “ATS”, or, “Applicant Tracking System”, yet ATS programs can be some of the most important components to a potential employer finding your resume. Today, almost every large company utilizes an ATS. ATS software can sort through thousands of resumes at once, qualifying resumes based on finding specific keywords. The more keywords your resume contains that a potential employer is looking for, the higher-up your resume will be ranked as a possible fit for the opportunity. Resumes that do not contain the keywords a company is looking for will likely never reach the eyes of a recruiter. Here are some tips for using recruitment technologies to your advantage:

• Research the job descriptions to which you are applying for and tweak your resume based on the terminology and specific keywords used in the description.
• Be sure your social media pages (i.e. LinkedIn) reflect what is on your resume; ATS programs can search and link social media pages to applicants’ resumes.
• Incorporating a “Professional Skill Set” section to your resume can be a simple and strategic way to include multiple keywords that describe your areas of expertise that can line-up with specific keywords.

Specifics: Being overly-general and generic can be detrimental to a resume. It can be easy to fall into the trap of describing job responsibilities that read more like a job description than a story of what you were responsible for and accomplished during your time at each position. For example, a phrase like “managed Sales Team to achieve sales goals” could be much more impactful if used with specific intel such as “managed a team of 7 Sales Representatives to consistently exceed quota of $150k in monthly sales”.  Here are some tips to consider when crafting a resume filled with specifics rather than general information.

• Using numbers to specify tasks and accomplishments will bring information to the forefront that will give readers a true sense of your accomplishments.
• Incorporating a “Career Highlights” section into your resume can set you apart from others by specifically highlighting your greatest accomplishments; this is often one of the first sections a reader’s eye will be drawn to when glancing at your resume.
• Giving specific examples of size and scope in relation to your job responsibilities will set you apart from those simply listing their responsibilities.

If you aren’t having the response from prospective employers you’ve expected to have, take a hard look at your resume while keeping these tips on format, recruitment technology and use of specifics in mind – it may be what you’ve needed all along to get the results you’re looking for.